


i loved and i loved and i lost you

by HelgaHufflepunk



Series: Anticat 4 The Soul [3]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Reincarnation AU, inspired by speaks nation bullshit, is this angst???? is it fluff???? is it being an asshole????, sorry anti, the answer is probably All Of The Above!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 03:11:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6836647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelgaHufflepunk/pseuds/HelgaHufflepunk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He loves her from the beginning.</p><p>Not from his first life, though, yes, then, too - not from the first time he sees her, from the first time she presses her lips to his, from the first time she whispers words of love into his skin like their own little infinity. Before that, before they have hands to hold each other or eyes to gaze or words to offer - he loves her from the beginning.</p><p>He loves her from the beginning, and their story really should have been as simple as that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i loved and i loved and i lost you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yellowjelo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowjelo/gifts).



> BUCKLE UP AND PREPARE TO READ ABOUT ANTICAT DYING A LOT

He loves her from the beginning.

Not from his first life, though, yes, then, too - not from the first time he sees her, from the first time she presses her lips to his, from the first time she whispers words of love into his skin like their own little infinity. Before that, before they have hands to hold each other or eyes to gaze or words to offer - he loves her from the _beginning._

He loves her from the beginning, and their story really should have been as simple as that.

He loves her from the beginning.

And, sometimes, that’s enough.

* * *

 

She has brown eyes, in that first life together. She has brown eyes, and her hands are calloused and dark and just the right size for him to hold. She has brown eyes, and they sparkle like the sky at night. She has brown eyes, and she is better with a spear then he will ever be, smarter and quicker and built for battle, and he loves her so much it feels like she has lit a fire in his chest, like one glance from her could warm him through even the coldest months.

He loves her, and, somehow, she loves him back.

He loves her, and he tells her every morning when they wake up. He tells her with the brush of his hand over her cheek, with laughter on the good days, with soft kisses and warm embraces and fierce protectiveness, with the way he looks at her when he holds their child for the first time.

He loves her and loves her and loves her, until his dying breath.

He loves her, and she loses him, and he will spend a thousand more lives trying to make up for it.

* * *

The next time they meet, it’s only for a moment.

It’s a brush of skin, a glance exchanged in a crowded street, the familiar spark of a love once felt - the momentary feeling of _knowing_ someone, even though you’re sure you’ve never met them before.

She smiles, wryly, and he has seen this smile before.

He thinks about her for weeks, wonders if he will ever see her again - wonders, heart caught in his throat, on one particularly cold night, if he ever saw her at all.

Time passes, and the memory of her goes with it.

* * *

In their third life, she has red hair, and she looks at him like she isn’t quite sure what to do with him. She has red hair, and her hands are freckled and calloused and her cheeks are forever smudged with dirt, and he knows she could lead armies if she wished. She has red hair, and it glows like fire in the clear, morning light, and he can’t help but fall in love.

She loves him, and he doesn’t doubt her. She loves him in soft ways, in hard ways, in stolen kisses between chores and bright smiles and the way her eyes fall on him in the morning, the way they light up, slowly, as she reaches up and runs a pale, freckled hand over his cheek. She loves him, and he can see the entire world in her eyes - can see a thousand lives together, can see his hand in hers - freckled or dark or scarred or calloused, always just the right fit despite it all. She loves him, and when she tells him - when she looks into his eyes and pushes his dark hair out of them and smiles, so, so softly - he thinks to himself that not even the gods could tear them apart.

She loves him, and he can see it in the way her eyes light up even as she starts to fade; she loves him and she loves him and she loves him, and he loves her. He loves her from the first time he sees her, eyes flashing, to the day she collapses in the fields, skin clammy and so pale he can barely see her freckles. He loves her from the first kiss to the last.

He loves her from the first time he sees her eyes open, slowly, to meet his in the morning light, to the day they don’t.

* * *

In their fourth life, she is born to wealth and fame.

He is not.

He is born in a little house in a little cottage in a village that will be forgotten to history. He grows up there, working his family’s farm and drawing in the candlelight, trying to capture his family’s faces, the way the sun sets on the land. He spends more than two decades there, in the mud, before he has enough money to go to the capital.

This, of course, is where he meets her.

Her hands are soft in this life - soft and pale and unsullied by work - and her gaze is haughty and fleeting when first they meet. She is as beautiful as she is cold, and he thinks to himself that if the moon herself were to take human form - if Selene were to come down from Olympus - that she would be the very image of the woman in the carriage before him.

He goes back to his house that night and thinks to himself that he shall never see her again.

He stays up until the sun rises, painting her into eternity, despite this.

He paints the night into her hair and the ocean into her eyes and the moonlight into her skin, tries to capture the mystery of her smile and the curve of her neck and the soft blues of her dress. He works until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer, strained and weary from working by candlelight all night long.

Her hands are soft, and he never gets to hold them - never gets to run his fingers over the skin and memorize the feel of it - never gets to know the way her lips feel over his own, or the secrets tucked into the corners of her smile. Her hands are soft, and he imagines, on the lonelier nights, what it would be like to feel the press of her palms against his skin or to see her smile, softly, in the morning light.

Her hands are soft.

They are not his to hold.

He paints her anyway.

* * *

In their fifth life together, he does not know the world without her.

They grow up side-by-side; they fall in love as easy as they breathe, as easy as they think - they fall in love in stolen kisses behind the stable and smiles across the dinner table, across years and miscommunications and the entirety of their world. They fall in love, full stop, and he spends the first two decades of his life trying to be worthy of her affection.

They fall in love, and they keep falling with every new sunrise; with every kiss and laugh and whisper. They fall in love, and that doesn’t make things easy - that doesn’t take away the pain or the hardship or the losses. They fall in love, and that just makes things livable; they fall in love, and that means that, even on the worst days, they have each other.

In this life, they do not know the world without each other; they live and lose and love side-by-side; they simply don’t die that way.

But that is not what matters, in this life; for, in this life, living is more than enough for them both.

* * *

In their sixth life, she loves him first.

She loves him softly, from afar - this is new. She loves him softly, hesitantly, like if she gives him her heart it might break in his hands. He doesn’t know how many times it had, before - how many lives they had spent in the world before this one. He doesn’t know why she looks at him as if she’s afraid he’ll disappear at any moment.

She loves him softly - in glances across ballrooms and smiles behind gloved hands, in worried glance and encouraging smile. Or - or perhaps, she does not love him softly. She loves him as hard as she always does; she loves him fiercely, with her entire being, with every ounce of goodness in her heart. She loves him and she loves him and, maybe, in this life, that scares her.

Maybe she loves him enough to find merit in pretending she loves him a little less than she does.

Perhaps it is her hesitance that has him so willing to enroll in the militia.

Perhaps it’s his own.

Then again, perhaps she loved him softly because she saw the fire in his eyes - the belief in what he was doing, in his cause. Perhaps she loved him hesitantly because he would’ve done it even if she had given him more than just whispered, hesitant flirtation on dirty, travel-weary letters. Perhaps she loved him hesitantly because she - as always - knew better than he did. Perhaps their love never bloomed, in this life, because she knew that either way it would end much too soon.

Perhaps it’s just as well that he dies, too-young, in a field far from home.

Perhaps this is just another life that he will spend the next apologizing for.

* * *

In their seventh life, they are soulmates.

Or - or, no, that’s not quite right. They were soulmates anyway, or at least as close to such a concept as two people can get. Maybe a better term would be partner.

Yes; in their seventh life, they are partners.

They are evil and they are misguided and they are far more powerful than they had any right to be. He carries destruction around his finger and she carries ruin in her ears; there is a world, a life, a _them,_ where they would burn the entire Earth to be heroes, to be loved, to be something other than what they are.

This is the world where they burn it because they can.

She has blue eyes, in this world - as if that matters. As if he will ever remember the lives where her eyes were hazel or brown or green, as if he will ever know any eyes but the ones that stare at him from behind that damned polka-dotted mask.

She has blue eyes, in this life; he will never forget the sight of them.

He presses a kiss to her knuckles - always hidden, always secret, always warm despite the fabric between them - and raises an eyebrow. Compliments her on a job well done as a butterfly flutters around in a room far away, ushering another Chosen into finding a hero worthy of their mayhem.

One day, a girl with black hair and eyes bluer than his lady’s will press these gems into her ears, will save their lives, will meet them hit for hit.

One day, a boy with blond hair and eyes as green as emeralds will slip on his ring and find freedom on the rooftops, in his own hands - in her eyes, as deep as the sea and just as mysterious and dangerous and -

And maybe history repeats itself in more ways than one.

* * *

In their eighth life, they live remarkably unremarkable lives.

They wake up in the morning. Smile at each other and press lazy kisses into the other’s skin and make pancakes on Saturdays and she drives to work and he stays at home to watch over their daughter and they fight over money and stay up late to work it out again, to press love back into the other’s chest, slowly - to heal wounds that they do not even know they have. She has fire in her eyes - brown, brown, brown - and he has awe written into his smile as he draws constellations into her freckled skin.

He paints - has been painting her ever since they bumped into each other on their college campus, since she first woke up in his bed and he knew that he had to immortalize the image, had to put to paper the sight of her soft skin and dreamy gaze and vulnerability, had to put it to paper to remember that she exists, that they exist, that this is more than just a passing moment in a life full of them.

He paints. She provides. This is, of course, the one thing they never argue about.

They have two children - both unremarkably brilliant, both stunningly beautiful, both the best things either of them have ever created.

They die side-by-side, hand-in-hand, smiling softly in their sleep.

It is, without a doubt, the best life they share.

* * *

In their ninth life - in their ninth life.

In their ninth life, she has blue eyes and blonde hair and their lives run like parallel lines; always side-by-side, always in the peripheral, always _aware,_ vaguely, distantly, but never truly _seeing,_ never feeling a sense of attachment, never crossing paths, really.

In their ninth life, he falls in love with a girl with blue eyes and a damned polka-dotted mask, and for a moment there - a flashing, terrifying moment - he has a ring on his finger that whispers of destruction. In their ninth life, he paints and sculpts and sketches and photographs, tries to capture the wrong ladybug, tries to immortalize the world through eyes that have not yet met hers, tries to ignore how it all feels a little wrong, through these eyes; through eyes that have never looked upon her with fondness or love or interest.

In their ninth life, she doesn’t notice him at all. She chases a boy with hair like the sun and eyes like the truth of the ocean, chases the best things, chases lives that she doesn’t know she has - chases blue dresses and gold carriages and loving whispers into paling skin and the kind of love that immortalizes you, that makes you reach out and become something much greater than you are.

In their ninth life, they spend the first two decades of their life becoming whole - becoming good, becoming better, becoming themselves.

In their ninth life, it seems they are destined never to love.

But, then again...perhaps.

Perhaps it’s not so odd for the young daughter of the mayor to be seen at a new art gallery opening - especially one dedicated to her favorite heroine. Perhaps it’s not so odd for her to admire it, to wish, with a pang in her chest, as selfish as always - though, perhaps, she’s getting better at this, too, by now - that someone will one day see her in the light this artist sees Ladybug.

Perhaps it’s not so odd for an artist to pause when he sees a young lady - a rich, famous, snobbish young lady, but a young lady nonetheless - crying in front of his centerpiece.

Perhaps it’s not so odd for the universe to wish, in the end, for a happily ever after.

* * *

He loves her from the beginning of everything.

Perhaps it's not such an odd idea - him loving her to the end of it, as well.

**Author's Note:**

> <3 ily guys oops


End file.
